The Colour Purple
Hello and welcome back to “There's a Book for That”, a podcast in which I, the resident bookworm in any friend group, talk about books I have read and apply them to issues in everyday life. Today we're continuing our Valentine's Week special, talking about love, from different angles, through different books. Love is such an interesting subject to talk about because it is so important for so many of us, to the extent that there is a whole commercial day of guilt and longing set aside to make those in love feel bad for not showing it, and those not in love, long for someone to spend the day with. Love’s great, and yet for a lot of people, if statistics, social media, TV and talking to people, be believed, love proves elusive time and time again, and if not elusive, disappointing.
I want to take a different approach today, looking at why it’s so easy for us to be disappointed in love, all the ways in which we may be setting ourselves up to fail, in romantic contexts and otherwise. To do this, we will be looking at a tiny part of the book, The Colour Purple, by Alice Walker.
So recently I had an experience where I was talking with a friend. And we're talking about my house. Actually, I really love my house. It's not quite as cute as I would like, but as I tell people, it's a reflection of my budget, not necessarily my taste. There are things that I would want to do differently, but I have set the foundation for it, and I am now building on that, and it’s lovely, and cosy and mine and I adore being in it. So, I was talking to this friend, and she said something to me about my décor being from the same shop, and I pointed out to her that there was a colour scheme I wanted and that shop had my colour scheme, so of course I made life easy for myself. And then she looked around the house and she says, “oh, I didn't notice”. She didn’t notice that the plates and cups matched the curtains, and the like, and I found that so interesting, because people really are different. We do not all care about the same things, and while this is not a problem generally, I see a lot of videos, and, we have been fed a steady diet of movies in which it does become a problem when this is the person that you are married to or living with. With a friend, who goes back to their home, it does not matter if you have the same standards of cleanliness, if you don’t care about clothes, if you share the same hobbies, or ideas about what is aesthetically pleasing, or fun, but in a relationship, this can frequently be the dripping water that erodes the foundations of the relationship.
This made me think of The Colour Purple and the passage that I will now read now, and where I stand on love vs compatibility when it comes to marriage. Full disclosure, I have watched way too many Bollywood movies, and have a very unhealthy view of arranged marriages. I definitely come down on team compatibility over love, but of course this is not without its issues, but I still hold that when it comes to relationships and marriage, especially for people who are planning to have children, you need to value the same essentials, and so, that’s what we are going to be talking about today. Value, what is valuable.
Like probably most of us who have read The Colour Purple, I first read this book at school, where I was fascinated by the new world that was being presented to me. Coming from Africa, and now living in the UK, I was not familiar with the story of Black Americans, and so this is definitely one of my first entries into a completely different world about people who are so very similar and so very different in so many ways. I loved Alice Walker and Maya Angelou at that age learning about worlds that with different characters who are so similar. Delving into the Colour Purple, I of course loved the character of Celie and had a lot of empathy with her.
For those of you who have not read the book, at its heart, The Colour Purple is a book about women, about Black women, and the ways in which life is frequently unkind to them. As you read the book, you meet different women who all have stories to tell. Even though their lives are far from being perfect and they frequently encountered sexual violence and physical violence, they have a strength and beauty in a character to them which is worth engaging with. It's important to talk about those difficult subjects, especially in this book. But for today and for this week, we're going to a more pleasant place, to a softer place.
We join our heroines, Celie and Shug, two women linked to each other by the same man, Mr_ Who is Celie’s older husband, and Shug, his on and off paramour. Celie and Shug, have been getting closer, in what I suppose we would today think of as a sort of polyamorous relationship, in which everyone gets at least a bit of what they need. In Celie’s case, it’s a friend, and as they talk about life and everything else, Shug shares her views (Alice Walker’s views) on Theology and religion, and the importance of acknowledging the love of God in everything that he made for us to enjoy. Accordingly, by enjoying what God made, we show our appreciation and praise him, even with things like sex, which we are often to encouraged to think about as taboo within religious circles. As Celie and Shug talk, in this conversation that we are privileged to eavesdrop on, Shug says, Quote
"Listen, God love everything you love — and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
What it do when it pissed off? I ast.
Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Yeah? I say.
Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.
You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say.
Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?”
End Quote.
I love this passage, because it talks about something that we all know to be true. We all want to be loved and appreciated, to be shown love, but oftentimes, it feels like perhaps we are not comfortable saying this out loud to people we want to like us. In doing those things, those acts, our little plays to try and get the attention we want, we may find ourselves trying to get the attention of people who really don’t get it. I remember once, this guy I liked, everything he did was exactly what I wanted, but he was so puzzled by it, because to him, it was not valuable, so he thought I was joking. I think he might have thought I wanted his money, but I just liked him, and I did all these silly things to try and get his attention. It did not work!
Then there are other people where I did not make much of an effort, because I could see that even if I did, the things they appreciated about me were not the things I appreciated about myself, so I would have to put in a lot of effort to keep that up, and I did not want to do that. In matters of the heart, I think we often underestimate the importance of compatibility when thinking about love, and reflecting on this passage in The Colour Purple, I started to think more about what causes disappointment in a relationship, any kind of relationship, and came to the conclusion, that so many times, what is happening is that one person is failing to notice the purple in someone else’s field. The pretty things that someone made, the efforts they made to be noticed, new lipstick or shoes, a new haircut, perfume, a new song, played or sung, a new recipe tried out for the first time, some sparkly thing on a wrist, a poem writ, a wood carving, a fish caught, barn built, quilt embroidered, joke made. We all have something that we do well, or care about other people associating with us, and we use this, like male peacocks, or God in Shug’s example, to make ourselves appear more interesting, and thus more worthy of love.
In this conversation between Shug and Celie, Shug says God is showing off. He's trying to do things to get your attention. He's trying to do things to get you to love him. Obviously now, there are some things that we do because we enjoy them, we would do them even if no one noticed. They bring us joy and that is enough. But there might also be somethings, in a general Venn diagram, which fall into the category of things that we love and things that we also want others to appreciate about us.
If you go and you get a new haircut, and nobody says or I like your new hair. If you go and get a new degree and nobody says congratulations, you get a new job, nobody says congratulations, you get new shoes and nobody says, well, they look nice. When you wear a new dress, nobody notices change your lipstick, nobody notices you. I don't know. You kill a bear in the woods, and nobody says, oh wow, you're so strong, well done, you weirdo, all these things start to pile up because you think that people are not appreciating you for the things that you appreciate about yourself.
I made sort of resolution myself when I was much younger, that I wanted people around me who appreciate me for the things that I appreciate about myself. So, it means that I have no problem being different or standing out, being the bookworm, or being generally weird, because that’s who I want to be. There are some things about myself that I think set me apart and make me interesting to myself, the reasons why if asked, I would choose to be alone and not with others, because I have enough fun alone. That's the choice that I've made. These are my purples, that I lovingly cultivate in my field, and when I meet people whose first response is to appreciate them instead of denigrating them, I am always super happy. However, the chances are, as I am not necessarily an orthodox being, most of those things are not purples that people around me care to see. They don’t see that purple, and even if they do, they might be inclined to point it out as a weed to be plucked out, than the very flower that I have been cultivating with love and tenderness for decades. We all have different “purples” in our fields, and we are not always surrounded by people whose eyes are attuned for that frequency of colour. I think that’s ok, except in a relationship where we want people to understand us and accept, affirm, and live with us. Perhaps because so many of my loved ones live abroad, or too far to ever spend significant amounts of time with, I set a much higher standard of compatibility for someone that I might have to live with, because the possibilities for you to ignore those purples in my field, disparage them and make me feel shitty about them, are much higher, if we are living together.
Simple things that I consider to be important when evaluating compatibility include the question,
What do you like about me, that I also like about myself? This is super important to me, because I generally wander off the beaten path, and this is something that I love about myself. I am not trying to be different, quite frankly, I am shocked to find myself off the beaten path every time, because I always start out thinking everyone else is doing the same thing. I would therefore hate to be in a relationship with anyone who did not find my adventures and eccentricities endearing. I definitely don’t want to be appreciated for the things I do well, that I do not necessarily value.
For example, I cook well, but because I consider cooking a life skill, someone bringing it up in response to a “why do you love her” would be like someone saying, “I love her because she can ride a bicycle or count to 10”. To me it’s ridiculous, because while I cook well, and sometimes make an effort to cook special foods for people I like, I would feed anybody. It’s not a purple in my field, it’s just an ordinary flower, like a dandelion, or daisy, it’s not something in my prize garden, like jacarandas, which actually are purple, or Bloom Chrysanthemums, my favourite flower. There are nice flowers in fields, which I share with people, but it’s actually more work for me to do that, than the purples which are just me, which flow out of me with ease, but are less likely to be appreciated by most people.
I am not sure if that comes across clearly, that there might be some things which are your purple flowers in your field, your shades of purple that you wish to share, but even though they are the most valuable things to you, they might also simultaneously be the easiest things for you to do. I cook well, I like to cook, I like to have people over, but it takes a lot out of me. However, as I mentioned in yesterday’s episode, talking about books for 5 hours, is nothing. So, the food, a larger group of people would appreciate, but for me, the purple, in the field is the book conversation. This, unfortunately, is what I want to be noticed for, and would gladly do more if I had more people noticing. “It’s what I want to spring on an appreciative audience when they least expect. Instead, I have a captive audience of the 5 people who listen to this podcast. Suckers!
We all have nice things to share with people, but it is our prized possessions, our most interesting facets for which we want to be noticed and appreciated. This is exactly what happened with that guy I liked. I was appreciating his daisies and roses, but not whatever his purples were. Maybe he wanted to be liked for his money, and would have been happier being able to show that he was a great provider, but I just wanted someone that I could talk to about sci-fi. It sounds really stupid, but I think it’s much more important than we realise.
For example, you might be into fashion and brands, I am not a good friend for you, because I have no idea what your purples are, and every time you tell me how much things cost, instead of acting impressed that you could afford it, I will tell you how many months’ rent, or holidays to Barbados (my two exchange rates) that would be. I don’t see that purple when it is in a field. The same as my story about the house, if you put me into any kind of home store, I am in my element, same with books or a swimming pool. But a friend of mine took me to an expensive designer shop, and I have never felt more like a villager in my life. I didn’t even know that all the bags had names. “Oh, could I buy the Caroline, from this year’s collection”. I was out of my element and completely uninterested in all the ostentatious shows of wealth around me. Those were not purples I would notice in a field, even if all the bags had stood up and walked, I would have wanted to go home.
In much the same way, If I was friends with a singer, and hated music, or could not appreciate it, that would be difficult. If I was friends with a dancer, and I hated ballet, or art, or whatever else, I would be missing out on the purples in their meadow, and they would be walking around trilling and pirouetting around, and I would just be irked by it, and eventually, it would be a problem. Their purple would begin to wilt in the absence of my sun and that would be sad.
Continuing with this theme from a completely opposite and funny angle, Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities had a very interesting episode in which there was a lady who didn't love herself as she was. Her husband adored her. He thought she was great, but as a quirky character, definitely off the beaten path, she wanted to be more like the other ladies at work, she wanted to be beautiful. She wanted to you know, be that kind of person that she walks into a room, and everybody turns around and people pay attention to her and ask her how she's doing and blah, blah, blah and all that kind of stuff. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But it meant that everything that her husband loved about her, her personality, her interests, the way that she was, was not what she wanted to be loved for. And so, in the end, that really affected the relationship in a big way. When I was watching that, I thought, sometimes it's not enough, you know, to be looking at somebody and saying, oh, I love you because of XY&Z, if that's not the thing that the person wants to be loved for.
Just as in the quote, when we see that we are not appreciated for one thing, or one set of things that we might love about ourselves, one ray of light we send out into the world in hopes of being appreciated, we might try something else. Celie askes, what does God do when people don’t notice the purple in the field, and Shug answers,
“Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
A lot of love is just people trying to spring little surprises on each other, to make each other happy, to bring shared joy and create memories. The difficulty lies in finding people for whom joy, funny, nice, fun, good, beautiful, and valuable, mean the same thing as it does to you, so you don’t end up putting your best work into a world that cannot or will not appreciate it. I have no answers for that part, or how to find these people, I apologise, but I do wish you all the best. You have a full day to find someone to spend commercial love day with you tomorrow, may the odds be ever in your favour!
Thank you for joining me for the second day of our Valentines week special. Join me tomorrow to talk about my good friend Mevlut, a man who found happiness where he was not looking for it, and my continued quest to understand how and why that was possible.
Ciao.